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public schools, who are so keen to make the language better, only getting into a deeper tangle of definitions the more they try to extricate themselves, and when we see our schools of journalism and the newspaper staffs of our leading papers ignoring constantly the ordinary rules of correct writing, we may well pause to ask ourselves whether our democracy, having been on trial so long, ought not to be sentenced to a term in "solitary."

It is our fatal fascination for adjectives and adverbs that undoes us. Our commercialized instincts constantly tempt us into superlatives, by reason of competition and high living. We think in terms of jazz. The Twenty-third Psalm is perhaps the most beautiful example of pure English in all the language: "The Lord is my shepherd: I shall

not want.

"He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

"He restoreth my soul."

In the twenty-nine words quoted, the two most prominent adjectives, "green" and "still," merely increase the intensity of the nouns they accompany. I spare the reader any attempt to show what a modern newpaper man would do with these opening sentences.

In its surface aspects, the decadence in our language is due to our extraordinary and hitherto unexampled transportation facilities for words. Big words that symbolized big simple ideas have been split up into masses of small words, which are thought to be refinements and thus to extend the human consciousness. The reverse is true. Complexity of

ideas is not extension but limitation. The old scribes were bound by the necessities of their work to make a severe choice of words, because the labor involved was great. Now we have such a bewildering mass of words to choose from, and so many writers have acquired such extraordinary skill in "bunching" them, that we have become the victims of a degenerate form of competition. The "super-salesman" is not confined to the counting-house. He "cerebrates"-as they say-in the author's den.

As far as the study of language is concerned, we may easily abandon almost all of the intricate and misleading grammatical definitions and classifications invented by the grammarians and rhetoricians, and simply remember that in a general way all words are either nouns or verbs; that is to say, they symbolize things or ideas that are real or permanent, or else they symbolize the action, the movement, or the development of those things and ideas. The excessive use of adjectives and adverbs is always a sign of weakness, indicating poverty of thought. Much more than this, it reveals a lack of faith. The material splendors and verbal superlatives of a godless people always end in their being mental and spiritual paupers.

I have watched the process of degeneration in the vocabularies of our leading writers now for the past ten years, and have found that the grammarian who makes his pedantic protest against it has about as much chance as an Indian guide who tries to cross Niagara in a canvas canoe.

The cure? Dear friends, it lies with all of us.

F

EQUALITY

America's Traditional Passion and Whither It Is Leading

GUSTAVUS MYERS

ROM THE beginning, equality of rights has been the goal of the American people as a nation. Viewed at particular junctures the progress has often seemed beset with contradictions and marked by incompleteness. But in perspective it shapes itself as a great continuous historic reality. Transient paradoxes clear away, and the urge for equality is seen as an irresistible one which, despite apparent breaks and checks, has driven steadily forward. As with so many aspects of human progress, there rises before the outlook a series of significant accomplishments of connected character and scope. Consummated in America these have had an increasingly world-wide influence.

The purpose in here reviewing at length the inequalities already swept away by the American people is not merely to relate past deeds. The narration of what has been done is of the utmost importance as a preliminary to the next foreshadowed step in achieving an altogether new kind of equality. The probability, if not the certainty, of this coming change can be much more easily understood by means of a consideration of the changes already wrought by the American people. Those Americans who may be inclined to

believe that America has done all it could in the direction of equality of rights will hardly fail to find in these facts the clear precursors of another change, which may well rank as the climax of the whole series.

When America began its independent national career, inequality was the established condition everywhere. American settlers did not detach their minds from European ideas. In dislodging themselves from oldworld surroundings they still retained in the new environment the customary ways of the old. They might, as did Massachusetts colonists, insist upon the right to make their own laws, but the theory and application of those laws followed European lines. All of the colonies were swayed by European concepts and dominated by its rulers. To the colonists Europe was the authoritative source of political, social, and cultural guidance; forms, methods, creeds, dogmas, and discords of the Old World were transplanted to the New.

Although of seemingly independent initiative, colonial legislation was in many cases a copying or paraphrase of the British. A comparison demonstrates this. Colonial lawmakers often reënacted the Brit

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Throughout the world peoples were almost fatalistically habituated to a belief in the positive need of inequalities. Of immemorial duration, inequalities were regarded as unchangeable. Nor was this traditional conviction ever allowed to weaken. Each generation was solemnly advised by preaching and warned by law that it must unconditionally accept the existing division of society as in accordance with divine will and human experience.

Disciplined to these teachings, no people or part of a people had ever thought of propounding the idea that every person had an inherent right to worship or not to worship as his faith and reason determined. The principle of placing all creeds and denominations as well as doubters and disbelievers on an equality of protection by law did not remotely enter the horizon of thought.

From distant recorded antiquity the church had been regarded as an integral part of the state; the functions of the two were fused; and the state's powerful machinery was used to enforce obedience to the dominant church. Periods of toleration did not imply inviolable legal rights. In imperial Rome Jews and Christians were alternately tolerated and persecuted. In later centuries the

same attitude applied to various Christian denominations, and to Jews in a number of European countries. The Reformation did not give religious liberty even to all Protestants. In England, for instance, dissenters from the Church of England were penalized; and a terrorizing sequence of laws, passed against Roman Catholics, remained in force for centuries.

Imitating such laws, or required to reenact them, many of the American colonies proscribed and persecuted. To a large extent accident of birth dictated what rights a man had or lacked. Born a Catholic, Unitarian, or Jew, and clinging to his religion, he was not allowed to vote or hold office in some colonies; in others Episcopalians, Quakers, Baptists, and Presbyterians were variously debarred. Repeating the European performance, the ascendant majority creed or denomination of each locality disfranchised nonconformists.

Towering above all social structural inequalities was that which asserted the inborn majesty of a small number of individuals called kings. Accident of birth alone decreed the vesting of enormous power in the hands of these creatures of circumstance. Instilled into peoples was the claim that royal personages derived their power from God, that submission to their will was a supreme duty, and that laws to enforce this reverent obedience were a paramount and pious necessity. Accompanying this claim was the incessant insistence that peoples were unfit to govern themselves. Even in England, where the king's power was qualified, the generality of the

people were endlessly assured that they did not know what was good for them, and pains were taken to imbue in them a horror of democracy as turbulent and incompetent.

An intrenched aristocracy of title stood on a lofty summit looking down scornfully upon the ordinary people. By the fortuitous route of birth its members inherited distinction, prestige, and social and feudal economic power. The same caprice of chance that made other men drudges converted them into lords and dukes. Ranking as peers, they were automatically endowed with extraordinary prerogatives of ruling the destinies of their fellow-creatures. The House of Lords in England has been a long-standing example. In realms devoid of parliamentary institutions titled noblemen usually had a compact monopoly of administrative offices and of official posts in army and navy. To the titled and their families, the glamour of transcending superiority was accorded; laws applying to common offenders were seldom permitted to reach their transgressions. For sovereigns homage was exacted, and awe for the nobility.

Below the titled ranks there was another class of lesser aristocratic pretensions but glorifying itself as far above plebeian folk. This was the gentry; what it lacked in descent it asserted in pride. Its basis was wholly that of material wealth; in general, land, deviously acquired. Successive inheritors took on increasing airs, bedecked themselves in pompous splendor, and had impressive genealogies fabricated for their exaltation. Back of their boast of "springing from a line of gentle

men" was nothing but the whim of birth. Legal forms gave them an assured eminence by registering them as "persons of quality." Of this class we had a conspicuous number in America, proprietary families whose founders by genteel corruption and chicanery had contrived to gain possession of huge domains. Upon these they built imposing mansions; they demanded ceremonious deference; they traveled in sumptuous blazoned coaches. The scions of the briber became social and political grandees.

Old-world devices to insure perpetuity of established aristocracies, both titled and untitled, were copied in America. Laws of entail and primogeniture conserved property by estopping its alienation and concentrated ownership power in the first-born son. Statutes and customs prescribing difference in attire were also imported. Despite some democratic political tendencies in Massachusetts, for instance, laws directed that persons of "mean estate" should not wear apparel appropriate to their superiors only.

Everywhere the force of social regulations commanded distinction in dress according to class and grade. Down to the American Revolution, and for a time afterward, class or occupational units of a street throng could be instantly identified by their garb. Gorgeous in finery, the aristocrat bespoke haughtiness. The sober dull costume of the tradesman reflected a due understanding of his station. Leather breeches, homespun coat, and brass-buckled coarse shoes were the mechanic's confession of his menial place. Backing up law and custom in justifying these

disparities, ecclesiasticism told the lower orders that they should humbly accept the lot to which they had been assigned by birth.

Political inequalities were interwoven with those of a social nature. In absolutist monarchical countries, peoples, of course, had neither voice nor vote. The same was true, however, of the great mass of people in such a supposedly constitutional country as England. The principle underlying British parliamentarism from the time of Magna Charta was that of landed property as the basis of representation. Estates voted, not men; until well in the nineteenth century England's House of Commons was elected by a mere handful of landed property-holders in each borough. Corruption of these was common and continuous. In pseudorepublican Switzerland political power was largely confined to a hereditary burgher oligarchy.

Transposed to America, England's property qualification laws forbade voting or office-holding rights to any one who did not have specified possessions in freehold property. So fixed was the concept that propertied men were the substantial element of the community that these laws outlasted the great changes of the period during and after the Revolution. Were such laws in operation to-day, millions of American citizens renting or leasing dwellings, offices, or farms would be entirely precluded from voting or from holding public office.

Inequality of educational rights was riveted in the prevailing system, which condemned the many to enforced ignorance. Schools and colleges were privileged institutions

giving a monopoly to the favored few. In general, here also accident of birth decided whether a human mind should be or should not be developed. Superimposed classes strove to keep the submerged in perpetual hereditary mental darkness. Astutely realizing that knowledge was power, the puissant forces, from the feudal lord to the capitalist, sought to exclude the mass of people from enlightenment.

Racial inequalities were deeply implanted. Civilization had outgrown the barbaric practice of enslaving the conquered, but it sanctioned the servitude of races of another color. While European nations were encouraging and profiting from the negro slave traffic, their officials here in colonial times also stimulated the enslavement of Indians. Only the fighting spirit of our native tribes prevented this condition from becoming general. In negro slavery we had an added enormity of bondage determined by circumstance of birth. Unless manumitted or otherwise released, the "person of color" from generation to generation was doomed to remain in the slave class.

Industrial inequality of rights was likewise derived from ancient oppressions infused with feudal conceptions. Here again, American laws followed the British. Masters were furnished with the most arbitrary control over their working men and women, who were stigmatized in law as servants. Artisans and all other employees had neither individual nor collective rights. Masters often had the legal power to prevent them from traveling from place of work or from marrying; at

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